Way Gone: “The Missing Person”

Way Gone: "The Missing Person"

Updating the private investigator film with September 11 shadings is not a terribly novel idea, but writer/director Noah Buschel isn’t an idea man. He likes feelings, atmosphere, actors, and emotion, and he originally said he was inspired to make The Missing Person because he was reading Raymond Chandler around the time of the attacks—but then he told indieWIRE that he was being slightly disingenuous when he originally said this, as his motivations were more vague. Buschel’s deprioritzing of tagline-ready storytelling mechanics is evident as his movie gawkily transitions between various plots. Surprisingly, it’s two elements that might seem like drawbacks that glue the pieces together and (somewhat) sustain the appeal of this mess—the consistently ugly graininess of the HDCAM and super-16 (itself digitally altered to look like DV) and Michael Shannon’s rewardingly repetitive performance. Click here to read the rest of Justin Stewart’s review of The Missing Person.